Boggle

Overview

Shake sixteen lettered dice into a 4×4 grid and find as many words as you can before the timer runs out. Words everybody found score nothing, which is the whole trick.

Checked against Hasbro's Boggle instructions (04601, the edition with an electronic timer in the lid, ©2008). That edition is for 2 to 4 players.

1. Setup

Shake the letter cubes into the 4×4 grid so each shows one letter face up, and put the grid where everyone can see it. Every player needs paper and a pencil. The game lasts three minutes.

2. Finding words

A word is valid when its letters are adjacent in the grid — horizontally, vertically or diagonally — forming an unbroken chain.

The rules:

• Words must be at least three letters long.
• No die may be used twice in the same word. You may reuse a die across different words.
• The letter block Qu counts as both letters at once.
• Any part of speech, plural, form or tense counts, as long as it's in a standard English dictionary. A singular and its plural both score if you wrote both down.
• Words within words count: spare, spa, par, are, spar and pare are six words.
• Proper nouns don't count.
• A word counts once, even if it has two meanings or you found it in two places on the grid.

The M, W and Z have a line under them, so a Z isn't read as an N.

3. Scoring

When time is up, players read out their lists. Any word found by more than one player is struck from every list. Only unique words score:

Letters	Points
3–4	1
5	2
6	3
7	5
8 or more	11

4. Winning

The winner is either the player with the most points when time runs out, or, in a longer game, the first to reach a target agreed beforehand, such as 50 or 100 points.

The instructions don't cover challenging a word. Most tables settle it with a dictionary.

5. Strategy

Long words score far more but are usually unique anyway. The real edge is in finding the five and six letter words others miss, while they are writing down cat, hat and the — all of which will be cancelled.

Suffixes are cheap points. Spot -ed, -er, -ing and -s chains and work backwards from them.

Diagonals are the most overlooked direction. Scan them deliberately.

Commonly argued

• Diagonals count. All eight surrounding dice are adjacent.
• You cannot reuse a die within one word, even if the letter appears twice.
• Qu is two letters and counts as two toward length.
• Words within words count, and so do plurals, if you write both.
• Duplicates cancel entirely — not halved, not shared. Struck from every list.